TGS 13 Culture Japan Booth

Photos of our booth at the Thailand Game Show 2013. It was our first time in Thailand and I was looking forward to experiencing the culture, learning new ropes and meeting new comrades.
I was invited to the Thailand Game Show to give a keynote talk and thought it made sense to have a booth at the same time.

It was difficult to gauge just how many readers and viewers of Culture Japan we had in Thailand. I thought we would sell at least 50 T-shirts over the 3 day event. But even though I expected to make a loss in terms of setting up booth, shipping merchandise and hiring staff, I was prepared to invest the money spent on everything to gain a new experience and learnings - experience and learnings which would not have come about if we just decided to do nothing.
More importantly however - it was crucial to make time to meet readers and viewers. I was not prepared for what was about to happen over the next 3 days.

We spoke to folks who bought stuff at our booth and found that about 80% of the folks didn't know about Mirai Suenaga but they thought she was cute from the illustrations so decided to pick something up. I then discovered increased incoming traffic from Thai search engines and BBS ever since.

From this experience, I realise that the costs of the booth should be considered as marketing costs as the exposure alone is worth the effort of setting everything up.

Setting up - the booth looked quite empty on the first day as customs didn't want to let our merchandise go. When they finally did, they charged us 80% import tax. We still managed to make a small profit after costs of booth, staff, shipping and tax though.